Our Nurse of the Week only received honorary credentials at best, but in the end, even a very hostile medical community had to acknowledge that Sister Elizabeth Kenny’s polio treatments helped thousands of children in the 1940s recover from the disease without being immobilized and imprisoned in braces and casts.
Born in 1880 in a New South Wales village in Australia, Elizabeth Kenny found her career path the way many nurses do today – as a girl, she found herself a patient and became fascinated with the science and practice of healing. When she broke her forearm after falling off a horse, the teenager developed a hunger for learning about human bones and anatomy. She found a mentor in the physician who treated her and, as David Anthony Forrest, PhD, RN, ANEF, FAAN relates in Nursing’s Greatest Leaders, “He had a wonderful library that contained a skeleton. She played with the skeleton for hours and learned how to trace muscle from origin to insertion.”
As she reached adulthood Kenny shadowed various nurses and doctors, then began to work as a “bush nurse” in Queensland, delivering babies and treating injured laborers, sick adults, and children. Bush nursing was a bit like being a traveling FNP, but young Elizabeth never attended a school, she reached her patients via horseback rather than plane, and instead of money she only accepted barter as payment. Kenny went on to work as a nurse on troop ships in World War I, and when they promoted her to “Sister” she adopted the title for the remainder of her career.
A treatment nearly as dreadful as the disease
In 1911 Sister Kenny encountered her first poliomyelitis epidemic. Polio had been endemic for most of known history when epidemics of the devastating intestinal infection began to break out in the 20th century. There was no cure and the Salk vaccine was not developed until 1955, and the fearsomeness of polio was exacerbated by the unpredictability with which the disease could strike. Before the vaccine, parents around the world faced each summer with dread: a fun family outing could turn on a dime and become a tragedy. It happened in 1921 to a then-39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt during a vacation, and in the US 35,000 children and adults were afflicted every year during the 1940s.
In treating children afflicted by a deadly disease with no known cure, her lack of classical medical training prompted her to base her treatments on empirical evidence. When she had treated soldiers with meningitis during the war, Kenny had learned that patients responded well to a combination of exercise, moist heat, and massage or manipulation. Could this also help in treating polio victims? Doctors were often horrified by her refusal to immobilize young patients who they believed should be immobilized ion braces, corsets, and casts, but Sister Kenny insisted that her methods not only were less harmful, they were usually more effective as well and her patients seemed more likely to recover the use of their limbs. While standard practice at the time was to confine patients – child or adult – in plaster casts for as long as 10 months, at which point some of the more advanced doctors recommended some light physical therapy.
As medical historian Bruce Becker, MD states, “The then-orthodox treatment of prolonged encasement in plaster was almost as bad as the disease.” Sister Kenny, however, feeling a nurse’s empathy for her charges, recognized this at the time without needing the benefit of hindsight. Arlene Wynbeek Keeling, Ph.D., R.N., F.A.A.N recounts in her History of Professional Nursing in the United States:
“Kenny maintained that patients’ affected muscles and limbs should be wrapped in hot packs and exercised—not immobilized, as was the customary medical treatment. Kenny’s method was most successful on early cases before deformities and paralysis occurred.
The treatment was done in three stages. In the first stage, hot moist packs were applied to the patients’ muscles; this helped to relax both the muscle and the pain. Next, gentle manipulation of the affected limb and muscles was performed. As treatments continued, the patients were allowed to move their own limbs with assistance until they were able to independently do so.”
The “screwball” vs the “dodos”
The medical communities in her home country and in the US were naturally hostile to the very idea that the patients of an uneducated nurse might be more likely than their own to recover and have a better quality of life during treatment and afterward. After all, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune once put it, “Most experts at the time thought polio killed nerve cells and yanked muscles out of place, requiring immobilizing casts and splints. Kenny insisted the muscles were merely tight so “your splints and casts are illogical; throw them out.” When she arrived in the US in 1940 to treat kids during the relentless summer polio epidemics, doctors in New York City and Chicago simply referred to her as a “screwball.”
The former bush nurse was never shy about returning fire, though, and it was not unusual for Kenny to tell experts that they were “dodos” for dismissing her methods without a hearing. Minneapolis truly embraced the persistent Sister, though, and she and her daughter treated patients at the Mayo Clinic and the Minneapolis General Hospital. By 1941, doctors started to abandon their “dodo” views. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) issued a report and Harvard orthopedist Frank Ober, an erstwhile skeptic, wrote in JAMA, “when her ideas are applied, splinting is not necessary. Sister Kenny’s treatment is superb nursing and common sense.” In 1942, she opened a 65-bed facility in Minneapolis, the Elizabeth Kenny Institute, and her work helped place the city on the map for implementing much-needed advances in polio treatment.
Sister Kenny’s determination and sheer force of character, her refusal to be intimidated – and the fact that their children not only seemed more likely to survive but even thrived after her treatments – certainly won over the American public. Today’s nurses – who are rightly proud of being America’s most trusted profession – might be pleased to know that in Gallup’s “most trusted women” polls the self-taught bush nurse ranked second only to Eleanor Roosevelt throughout the 1940s. Sister Kenny owned that #2 spot for nearly a decade and made #1 in 1952 just before she died.
Resources on Sister Kenny
If you are interested in the history of nursing, Sister Kenny is one of the most colorful nurses ever to make a mark. Her significance and popularity in the US were such that Hollywood made a film about her in 1946 starring Rosalind Russell and new accounts of her life, battles, and work continue to appear in both the US and Australia.
“Since I was in, I think, about 4th or 5th grade I knew I wanted to be a nurse,” says Brittany Wilborn, RN. It took the mother of five nearly a decade, but Wilborn, our Nurse of the Week, knows how to persevere and how to pace herself. She has cleared the many obstacles in her path, developed an arsenal of leadership skills, and is steadily amassing a collection of nursing credentials. Over the past 10 years, she progressed from a CNA to an LPN, then an ADN RN. Before the ink had dried on her RN, she had gone on to enroll in a BSN program. And after that? She plans to become an FNP.
Wilborn’s nursing aspirations were born early in life. As a child in Galesburg, Illinois, when Brittany went to see her pediatrician, it was not the doctor, but the nurse who attracted the little girl’s rapt admiration. The APRN-to-be recalls, “I thought she was so pretty, and she was professional. The way she approached me and treated me, made me feel better about myself and the situation. That’s when I knew that I wanted to be a nurse.”
But she had a lot of living to experience first. After Wilborn graduated from high school in 2010, she enrolled at Carl Sandberg College to begin her studies and earn her CNA credentials. However, life had other plans for her. Brittany became pregnant and soon dropped out to give birth to twin boys. (Twin boys have a talent for stopping all sorts of things). For the next few years, she focused on mothering the boys through their Terrible Twos and had two more children. Looking back, Wilborn thinks she needed to do some growing up herself first. “Now I feel like it [dropping out of college] was an excuse that I was making,” she said, and added, “And I think it’s one that a lot of us, as parents, make. ‘Oh, the kids, oh the kids!” After giving birth to child number four, though, she decided it was time to move fully into independent adulthood and pursue that nursing career: “2014 is when my journey really began to take off. I became a CNA, started working, got an apartment, and moved out of my mom’s house….”
After earning her CNA, Brittany went on to complete Sandburg’s Licensed Practical Nursing program in 2018. However, as a woman of color she had been subject to so many non-criminal law enforcement encounters that the NCLEX-PN criminal background check was deeply intimidating. Anxious and overwhelmed, she went no further until Covid and an insightful instructor pushed her forward. While Wilborn was working as a CNA at the height of the pandemic, the nurse she was assisting told her, “I don’t know why you won’t be a nurse. Why won’t you take your boards?’ Then, Stacy Bainter, MSN, a Sandburg nursing faculty member, also urged her to go ahead. “I realized that [your history] doesn’t define who you are and what you’re capable of,” Wilborn says. And, with a conscientiousness typical of good nurses, she thought, “If (Bainter) believed in me and Sandburg believed in me to give me this degree, I owe it to them to at least apply for my nursing license and put it to use.” She also began to flex her leadership skills (valuable not only for nurses but to any mother of twin boys). Brittany joined Sandburg’s Black Student Association, became a student trustee for Sandburg’s Board of Trustees, and was selected as chairperson for the Illinois Community College Board’s Student Advisory Committee.
Today, Wilborn has five kids and a growing collection of degrees and certifications. She is now an RN with an associate’s degree (ADN), but that is just the beginning. Wilborn is pursuing her BSN now at a joint Sandburg/Chamberlain College program, and after that plans to enroll in the FNP program at Chamberlain College. If there are more obstacles ahead, Wilborn will find her way around them: “It’s necessary for me to keep going because I know that I can. It’s necessary because I feel like I shouldn’t limit myself. For some people, the ceiling, that’s their limit. And for others, the ceiling is your bottom.”
For more on Brittany Wilborn, RN, see her interview with local TV station KWQC.
One occupational hazard of being a nurse (or even a nursing student!) is that friends, family, and even brand-new acquaintances tend to buttonhole you for on-the-spot diagnoses and ad hoc consultations. And, since you are completely on board with helping people, you respond as a nurse whether you’re wearing scrubs or street clothes. So, it comes as no surprise that so many off-duty nurses save lives at accident scenes, public events, and —in the case of our Nurse of the Week, Loyola Medicine NICU nurse Mary Lovelace, RN—sometimes they save the odd life while on vacation.
The pint-sized (5’2”) Lovelace is accustomed to treating tiny, premature newborns, so the encounter with her first grown-up “patient” in years gave her quite a workout. The 58-year-old was returning from dinner with friends during a trip to Scottsdale, Arizona when a stranger went into cardiac arrest and fell down right in front of her male partner’s son. Lovelace initially thought the large man was merely clowning with friends, but then, recalls, “I looked down and I’m like, ‘Oh, god. He was already really gray.” She shared a few traits with the fallen man. Angelo Valenti is also 58; he’s from Chicago as well and was visiting Scottsdale on vacation; and suddenly, both their holidays had become extremely eventful.
As Lovelace told Valenti’s companions to call 911 and seek out a defibrillator, she was already starting work on her patient. On duty in the NICU, she customarily performs two-finger CPR on neonates, but as luck had it, less than a month ago she’d brushed up on the standard, much more muscular resuscitation technique at a CPR refresher course. Like most nursing jobs, caring for preemies requires physical strength and endurance, though, and Lovelace persevered with her best two-fisted CPR for eight minutes, only stopping when the local EMTs showed up. In fact, one of Valenti’s ribs broke during her compressions, but keeping a cool head, she remembers thinking, “In my mind, I’m like, ‘Oh buddy, I’m sorry, but thank goodness you’re still breathing.’”
An ambulance arrived and sped Valenti to the nearest hospital. He was unable to respond to his name for the first couple of days but quickly recovered and flew home a week later after surgeons implanted him with a cardioverter-defibrillator to help prevent a future cardiac arrest.
The two Chicagoans have been in touch since their paths crossed so dramatically and have formed a bond. When a grateful Valenti called to thank her for her prompt care, “It was very powerful,” Lovelace says, “It was a very emotional conversation. I’m glad I was there at the right time to do what I can do and what I’ve been trained to do over the years.”
See a full account of Mary Lovelace and Angelo Valenti’s exciting Arizona journey at the Chicago Tribune.
The scrub wardrobe of Philadelphia nurse and elite marathoner Samantha Roecker, RN is undergoing an unprecedented stress test this month. One might even say that her scrubs are moonlighting, but it’s for a good cause.
Our Nurse of the Week is running through the Philadelphia streets in her scrubs as she prepares to achieve the “fastest marathon run in a nurse’s uniform” at the Boston Marathon on April 18, 2022.
While some fellow distance runners cheerfully concern-troll her about potential chafing, Roecker’s unusual athletic apparel has been fine so far, and at the marathon will be worn in honor of her profession – and of the sponsors behind her fundraising run to support the American Nurses Foundation’s mental health and wellness programs. (The American Nurses Foundation and Moxie Scrubs are backing her effort).
“I was trying to think of what I could do to make running not a selfish thing, but a meaningful thing.”
Her inspiration for the fund-raiser was her fellow nurses – and her own experience. Roecker observed, “It seems like every day there’s a new story about nurse burnout or health-care workers struggling.” And, when she picked up first-hand frontline experience earlier this year, she became keenly aware of nurses’ urgent need for more robust mental/emotional support systems.
“On top of really tough diagnoses like cancer or brain fluid leaks or whatever we deal with on a ‘normal’ daily basis,” Roecker said, “Pandemic worries about who’s going to accompany somebody to the hospital during their chemotherapy treatment or how they would get a test prior to treatment — all of those unknown stressors and barriers added up.”
Apparently, the inspiration struck while she was showering one day: “I was trying to think of what I could do to make running not a selfish thing, but a meaningful thing,” she told Runner’s World.
Like many nurses, the Philly RN always has a lot going on. Roecker is currently working 25 hours a week as an RN at an otolaryngology clinic while pursuing an FNP degree at Penn Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania and puts in 20 clinical hours a week at Cooper University Hospital. On top of that, she manages to run 90 to 100 miles every week.
Nurses supporting nurses
She is a passionate and competitive runner, and her marathon project combines her love of the sport with her dedication to nursing and helping others. As Roecker puts it on her American Nurse’s Foundation fundraising page, “Over the last two years, I have witnessed and personally experienced the effect that the COVID pandemic has had on healthcare workers’ mental health and wellbeing. This April, I am combining my two passions and attempting to break the World Record for ‘fastest marathon run in a nurse’s uniform’ at the Boston Marathon.”
The funds that Sam will raise will go towards the American Nurses Foundation’s Well-Being Initiative programs supporting the mental health and wellness of RNs. The initiative offers RNs access to free therapy resources, expressive writing programs, financial consulting, podcasts and mobile apps dedicated to mental health and well-being, and content dedicated to grief and bereavement.
There are some deliveries that are far beyond the abilities of USPS orPostmates.
Everyone knows that the old saw “any port in a storm” is a truism when a pregnant woman is in labor and trying to reach a hospital – but luckily, nurses are accustomed to serving at stormy ports.
On February 9, though, our Nurse of the Week, Public Health nurse Evelyn Davis RN, was still a little nonplussed when the grandmother of an expecting – imminently expecting – mom realized her daughter couldn’t wait a moment longer and swung into the parking lot at the Adamsville Regional Health Center in Fulton County, Georgia.
As the grandma imploringly flagged her down, Davis thought, “So this is a health center. You usually don’t show up here to deliver your baby!” However, although the Adamsville Regional HC is not in any way prepared for midwifery or deliveries, and Davis now specializes in caring for HIV/AIDS patients, the RN is a veteran nurse who delivered hundreds of babies on Hopi and Navaho reservations in Arizona earlier in her career.
Davis’ experience bringing all of those brand-new Hopi and Navaho infants into the world was fortuitous. The mother-to-be and grandmother were well into the “oh my gosh – it’s happening!! Help!” stage of a pending delivery, and soothing words from an experienced nurse were exactly what the mom needed.
“Lord! What are we gonna do?”
The ambiance of a parking lot at a downtown public health clinic bears little resemblance to a hospital labor and delivery unit. As Davis says, the situation was “chaotic.” She recalled that “There were people screaming, ‘She’s going to have the baby! Help her! Oh, Lord! What are we gonna do? This is not a hospital. She should not be here!’ So, I just asked everyone to calm down and got the mother to calm down.”
As the poor mother was frantic, Davis continued, “I introduced myself… because she was hysterical, understandably, and I calmed her down and let her know that we were here to help her. She was screaming trying to prevent the baby from coming and I told her not to do that because you’re gonna get a very strong contraction and that baby’s gonna fly out.” (Delightful as it might sound to a harried mom in labor, in general flight is not an optimal mode of exit from the womb).
Davis points to the ARHC’s new “ad hoc Delivery Entrance.”
As the mother began to understand that grandma had made the right call in pulling over into this particular parking lot, Nurse Davis pulled on gloves, and staffers inside the Center ran for supplies because this baby couldn’t wait. “I checked her,” Davis says, “and the baby was right there, and I knew it was a matter of one or two or three pushes and everything would happen.”
“Come on, baby! Breathe, breathe, breathe.”
In fact, more happened than any of the players had bargained for. As the newborn entered the world in front of the Adamsville Regional Health Center, there was a slight hiccup (of course the mother probably would not choose that phrase). Davis said that the actual birth came after a few pushes, but the baby girl who emerged had gray skin, and “She still wasn’t breathing, so we had her wrapped up. I started rubbing on her chest and I was like, ‘Come on, baby, breathe, breathe, breathe. Come on, take a breath, take a breath, baby.’ And I just rubbed the baby’s chest, and then she let out a scream.”
The mother and baby girl were taken to a nearby hospital for an examination and might not have realized just how fortunate they were. “I’m just glad we were all here to help,” Davis said, but observed, “Ten minutes later, this place would have been closed and no one would’ve been here…”
You can see a video interview with Evelyn Davis, RN here.
Her inspiration for the fund-raiser was her fellow nurses – and her own experience. Roecker observed, “It seems like every day there’s a new story about nurse burnout or health-care workers struggling.” And, when she picked up first-hand frontline experience earlier this year, she became keenly aware of nurses’ urgent need for more robust mental/emotional support systems.
